[We take a break from our regularly scheduled programming of “Mount Bliss” in order to bring you this brief story that was published in the April Issue of ENM Magazine (Ethical Non-Monogamy). ENM only launched in January of this year and now, due to COVID-19, is struggling. Please stop by and support them. Thanks.]

“It is hard to imagine ‘slut’ being reclaimed the way ‘queer’ was, as a respectable label for academic programs and cultural centers.” (“Slut: The Other Four Letter S-Word,” on Fresh Air, WHYY, NPR, March 13, 2012)

The course was only open to graduate students and doctoral candidates.  They were mostly from the Women’s Studies department, but some were from English and/or Comp. Lit.  One or two were from the Philosophy department and one from the Religious Studies/Theology department.  It didn’t matter where they came from; what mattered was that they came.

This was the cutting edge of academia: Slut Studies.  The syllabus was a stroll down all the dark, forbidden stacks of the salacious, suggestive, censored and censured, prurient, perverted, plucky and poetic pornographic literature of the centuries.

It culminated with an in-depth reading and analysis of Match, Cinder & Spark.  The professor was only a few years older than the students, if that.  The student body was female and most of them either lusted for or loathed the professor because she was either the woman they wanted to bed or the woman they wanted to be.

They listened intently to her lectures and were eager to contribute to the lively debate about the nature of the nympho.

The English Lit student, Yael, said, “I think that Lola is a metaphor, a symbol, maybe even a mythic archetype.”

“Of what?” replied the professor.

“Of the receptive, open, accepting, and limber principle of life.  The Great Feminine.  And her squirting episodes are emblematic of the fluidity of life.”

“Like Yin in Taoism?” inquired the professor.

“Or it could be the other way around,” chimed in the Theology student.

“What do you mean by that?” asked the professor, genuinely confused.

“I mean. . .” began Sarah, the seminarian, searching for the right formulation of her thoughts, “that maybe we need to reimage our notion of God.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” said the professor.  “How does that relate to the text?”

“Well, for millennia, God was understood as a stern, strict, father figure.  Or, even if we look at the New Testament, a chaste, pure, abstemious saintly sufferer.  There’s little room for pleasure, sex, sexuality, or love that borders on desire in those paradigms.  Without a sex-positive godhead, how can you be sex-positive giving head?”

There were some chuckles in the classroom at that comment.

“No, seriously,” she implored, “maybe Lola is the avatar of a sex-positive spirituality.”

“That seems to bring us right back to Plato’s Diotima,” the professor said, trying to reframe the discussion and put it on an academic foundation.

“I don’t see why we have to contextualize the cunt in such highfalutin imagery,” interrupted one Marxist from the class.

The professor wasn’t sure if her use of “cunt” was literal or synecdoche.

“I mean,” said Mandy the Marxist, “there’s a direct correlation between the pussy and the personality.  It’s that simple.  Open, warm, welcoming, easy, or tight, closed, and constricting.  One either gives and receives or one is greedy and rejecting.”

To that comment, there was a big uproar in the class.  It seemed everyone wanted to criticize Mandy.

One voice eventually won out over the din.  “That is so black and white!  So dualistic!”  It was Penny, the philosopher.  “You Marxists are just Hegelian dialectical materialists.  It’s either/or with you.”

“Please, please,” refereed the professor, “There’s no need to be so personal.”

“I’m not being personal,” said Penny.  “I’m not attacking Mandy.  Just her philosophical assumptions.”

“Well, let’s make sure that we’re all clear about that,” the professor said, trying to keep the calm.

“Lola is more complex than goddess/whore, open/closed, yin/yang.  Yes, she has a lot of sex, with herself and others.  But, ultimately, she’s just human with human foibles, human desires, and she’s flesh and blood.”

“She’s a literary character,” interrupted Yael.

“I mean,” said Penny, “she’s depicted like a human of flesh and blood.”

“Actually,” said the professor, “she is a human of flesh and blood.”

“What?” gasped many of the women.

“Well, yeah,” said the professor, a bit embarrassed that she let the pussy out of the bag.  “I know her.”

“You know her?!” one of the students asked in disbelief.  “I thought this was fiction.”

“It says right on it ‘roman à clef,’” she said.

“Meaning?” asked one of the students.

“That’s a look-it-up question,” shot back the surly professor.  She had no patience for graduate students who don’t use the incredibly convenient tools at their disposal, like the internet.  “It means a text in which the characters are based on real people, but their identities are slightly concealed.”

“So Lola is a real person and you know her?”

The professor nodded.

They were all on the edge of their seats waiting for her to reveal more.

“I think now is a good time to take a break,” said the professor.

While outside the classroom, the students chatted, musing amongst themselves, “Do you think she is Lola?” one asked, referring to the hot professor.

“No way,” said another.

“Could be,” pondered a third.

“I bet she is Lola,” said a fourth.

“You’re totally wrong,” said another.

“How do you know?”

“Because, it’s a ‘look-it-up question’,” she said, mimicking the professor’s snide tone.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I looked up Lola Down and found so much!”

Everyone took out their phones and started looking her up.

Ooos and Ahhhs were heard before they were stifled as the professor walked by and all the women compared what they saw on their phones to the professor’s curvy figure in her tight dress as she pranced past them.

They followed her in, each formulating a theory about the fount of her personality.

 

[This story was inspired by Yael Wolfe (@yaelwolfehowls). Lola & HH also are very thankful to the gentlemen at Tehben.com (Matthew Burroughs and Nelsen Rockingham) who have thoughtfully reviewed three of the Match, Cinder & Spark books. We avidly welcome other scholars, such as John of astijake.wordpress.com and Dr. Kasey Butcher of phdsandpigtails.com, to write a scholarly review.]